Queer Havens

July 12 - August 10, 2025

A new exhibition by World Press Photo in collaboration with Pride Photo will open this summer in Amsterdam.

Since the 1970s, LGBTQIA+ communities around the world have worked to create environments where they can live, gather, and express themselves freely—away from the discrimination and hostility that many still face daily. Often described as “safe spaces,” these are both physical and emotional refuges where queer people can exist without fear, and where joy, resistance, and belonging can thrive.

Queer Havens is an exhibition of more than 40 works that explores what safe spaces look like, how they are built, and what they mean to the people who create and inhabit them. Co-curated with Pride Photo, the exhibition brings together twelve powerful photographic projects—six from the World Press Photo archive and six from Pride Photo—each offering a distinct lens on what it means to find or make safety as an LGBTQIA+ person today.

“The exhibition brings together artists from across the world and depicts a range of stories and life views. The photos show experiences of chosen families, intimate relationships, and nightlife, to reclaim queer history, personal transitions, and acts of remembrance—revealing how queer communities imagine and create safe spaces. We look forward to audiences seeing the work this summer, as part of our World Press Photo 70th anniversary program.” said Raphael Dias e Silva, and Alba Noguera of World Press Photo

FATHOM © Cansu Yıldıran

FATHOM’ presents a series of staged documentary photographs honouring the stories of LGBTQIA+ individuals who have lost their lives in fatal homophobic attacks. The photographer works with individuals from the LGBTQIA+ currently living in Turkey to create these powerful images, drawing on modes of non-normative storytelling, and creating a connection between those who have been killed, and those who survive, visually representing the struggles and very real danger that the LGBTQIA+ community continues to face. ‘FATHOM’ is an exploration of queer identities, and a testament to resilience.

Artists include
From Pride Photo:
Tamta Gokadze
Ky Smiley
Adrien Selbert
Quetzal Maucci
Cansu Yıldıran
Andres Perez

Kysaan & Ky © Ky Smiley

“Learning how to discuss my top surgery with my little brother has been simpler and more enlightening than I could have imagined. He helped me during recovery and I can not be more thankful. We have both benefited from our creation of a safe space for dialogue and I know it will help in both of our journeys of growth and acceptance.” - Ky Smiley

Grandparents, aunts and cousins reunited to celebrate Beatriz’s 15th birthday. Personal family archive. 1970s, Catia, Caracas, Venezuela from the project Dead Family © Andrés Gregorio Pérez

Andrés Gregorio Pérez’s project ‘Dead Family’ explores the invisibility of LGBTQIA+ identities in traditional family albums, which often reflect imposed, heteronormative expectations. Through creative edits of personal family photos, participants reimagine inclusive memories that celebrate their true selves and challenge dominant narratives.

From World Press Photo:
Mads Nissen
Heba Khamis
Temiloluwa Johnson
Hannah Reyes Morales
Maika Elan
Mackenzie Calle

The exhibition will take place before and during Amsterdam Pride 2025 (12 July – 10 August) and will be presented both outdoors in Westerpark and indoors at Het Meterhuisje in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and is free to visit. A public program is planned for the opening day of the exhibition. Further details will be announced closer to the date. For those not in the city, the work can also be viewed on the website of World Press Photo.

Organized in collaboration with Pride Photo, Queer Havens is a unique opportunity to experience a nuanced representation and celebration of the infinite diversity found within and among queer voices, visions, and identities. This exhibition has been made possible thanks to Amsterdam Fonds voor de Kunst, Cultuurfonds, and Stadsdeel West.

Jochen (71) and Mohamed (21; not their real names) sit in the Tiergarten, Berlin. Jochen fell in love after meeting Mohamed, then a sex worker in the park from the project Black Birds © Heba Khamis

Prostitution between consenting adults is legal in Germany, and German aid charities have reported a marked increase in the number of young migrants turning to sex work. While they wait for their documents, refugees are not allowed to work legally or attend school. The German government prioritizes assistance to refugees from countries with an ongoing war; those seeking asylum from countries without war are placed in a second category, where papers take longer to complete. This lack of employment opportunity creates a severe lack of choice for many, with some young men becoming sex workers, sometimes to fund a heroin addiction. The Tiergarten, a large park in central Berlin, is a popular meeting spot for male sex workers and older clients.

A staged recreation of the original Mercury Seven crew from 1960 photographed in New York City, United States from the project The Gay Space Agency © Mackenzie Calle

This project combines fiction with fact in order to confront the US space program’s historical exclusion of openly LGBTQI+ astronauts. In a review of the NASA and United States National Archives, the photographer found no documentation on the contributions of the queer community to the space program. The absence inspired her to imagine ‘The Gay Space Agency’, a diverse and inclusionary institution that commemorates and celebrates the history of queer astronauts. Project funded with support from the Magnum Foundation Counter Histories Grant.

Jon (21) and Alex (25), a couple, share an intimate moment at Alex’s home in St. Petersberg, Russia on 18 May 2014 from the project Jon and Alex © Mads Nissen

This image became well known for LGBTQ+ rights in Russia and despite experiencing attacks and increasing discrimination, Jon and Alex continued their involvement in LGBTQ+ activism until Alex's death from heart failure in 2019. Homophobia in Russia has been rising following a 2013 legislation banning so-called “gay propaganda”. Since 2017, human rights groups and media have reported the imprisonment and torture of LGBTQ+ people in Chechnya, leading to the EU imposing sanctions on two Russian officials in 2021.

About the World Press Photo Foundation
World Press Photo is an independent non-profit organization that champions the power of photojournalism and documentary photography to deepen understanding, promote dialog, and inspire action. Founded in the Netherlands in 1955, our annual and thematic exhibitions reach millions of people in over 80 locations world-wide each year, and our online work reaches millions more. We create space for reflection in times of urgency, while upholding standards of accuracy, authenticity, visual excellence, and diverse perspectives. Our education programs help photographers reach these standards, and members of the public recognize them. We are thankful for the support of our funders, particularly our strategic partners the Dutch Postcode Lottery, PwC, and FUJIFILM Corporation.

Al Enriquez (86) looks through a curtain in the Golden Gays’ home in Manila, the Philippines, on 18 July 2022 from the project Home for the Golden Gays © Hannah Reyes Morales, for The New York Times

The Golden Gays is a community of older LGBTQI+ people from the Philippines who have lived together for decades, sharing a home, caring for each other as they age, and staging shows and pageants to make ends meet.
The Golden Gays community was founded in the 1970s by lawyer and activist Justo Justo, who opened his home to shelter ‘lolas’ – a local word for ‘grandmothers’, an affectionate term members of the group have adopted. When Justo died in 2012, the community were evicted and some experienced homelessness until 2018, when they began renting a house in Manila.

Todd Hido: Intimate Distance, Over Thirty Years of Photographs, A Chronological Album

By Todd Hido

Publisher : Aperture

2025 | 320 pages

An expanded chronology charting Todd Hido's career, with ten years of new work.

Well known for his photography of landscapes and suburban housing, and for his use of detail and luminous color, acclaimed American photographer Todd Hido casts a distinctly cinematic eye across all that he photographs, digging deep into his memory and imagination for inspiration. Newly revised and expanded, Intimate Distance: Over Thirty Years of Photographs, A Chronological Album includes ten years of new work since the book's first publication, including breathtaking new images from his travels to Iceland, Norway, and Japan, where he brings both a familiar eye and an expansive new vision.

Though Hido has published many smaller monographs of individual bodies of work, this gathers his most iconic images, along with many unpublished works to provide the most complete and comprehensive monograph charting his career. The book is organized chronologically, showing how his series overlap in exciting ways. David Campany introduces the work and looks at the kind of cinematic spectatorship the work demands. And Katya Tylevich muses on the making of each of Hido's major monographs, "The photographs lead as far as human-made roads go. They reach the periphery of utility wires, footprints, and paths already taken." From exterior to interior, surface observations to subconscious investigations, from landscapes to nudes, from America and beyond, this midcareer collection reveals how his unique focus has developed and shifted over time, yet the tension between distance and intimacy remains.

All About Todd Hido

Stephen Shames: A Lifetime in Photography

By Stephen Shames

Publisher : Kehrer Verlag

2025 | 228 pages

The life’s work of one of the most important photojournalists of our time, covering major events in American history from the 1960s to present

Stephen Shames is an American photojournalist for more than five decades. In his award-winning photo essays, he draws attention to social issues such as child poverty and racism. During his career Shames authored numerous books, among others Power to the People: The World of the Black Panthers and Outside the Dream: Child Poverty in America. Kehrer Verlag is now publishing a comprehensive book containing many unpublished photos. Although Shames photographed many diverse subjects including presidents from Kennedy to Obama, activists and visionaries like Martin Luther King or Stephen Hawking, and people from countless cultures, there is a thread connecting his pictures: Shames’ photos of children and families focus on what tears us apart and binds us together: violence and abuse, but also love, hope, and transcendence. The images come from his heart and soul.

Ralph Gibson: Photographs 1960-2024

By Ralph Gibson

Publisher : Taschen

2025 | 552 pages

Travelling widely, Ralph Gibson works primarily in inspired series, associated image reveries in both monochrome and colour, whose titles―The Somnambulist, Déjà-Vu, Days at Sea, and Chiaroscuro―underline the particular poetic sensibility that informs his work. Starting out in 1960 with Dorothea Lange, he made his way to New York in 1967 and was soon considered in the same light as the likes of Larry Clark and Diane Arbus. The photographs and series can of course speak for themselves. But for Gibson there is a philosophy at play behind the image, and in the included short texts he proposes his thesis. Nudes, portraits, still lives, narratives―loyal to his Leica, Gibson ranges between genres and creates new categories of vision. He gets closer to things and meditates on them in a way that only the silence of the image can attempt.Produced in close collaboration with the artist, this book offers the fruit of more than six decades of image-making. From Gibson’s first photographs in San Francisco, Hollywood, and New York in the 1960s right up to the present day, this is the most comprehensive collection of this highly acclaimed photographer.

All About Ralph Gibson

Richard Avedon Immortal: Portraits of Aging, 1951-2004

By Richard Avedon

Publisher : Phaidon Press

2025 | 208 pages

An unflinching exploration of aging from one of the twentieth century’s most influential photographers

For more than half a century, Richard Avedon sought to represent advancing age in the faces of the people he photographed. From his earliest years at Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue through to the twenty-first century, Avedon routinely and audaciously broke the rule of flattering public personalities in his portraits. Instead, he chose to highlight the onslaught of what he called the “avalanche of age,” dramatizing the universal experience of getting older.

Accompanying a groundbreaking exhibition at The Image Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University and The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Immortal is the first book to delve into Avedon’s unflinching representation of aging throughout his career.

This elegant hardcover volume features nearly 100 portraits of cultural luminaries, each printed in striking tritone, such as Michelangelo Antonioni, Truman Capote, Marcel Duchamp, Duke Ellington, Toni Morrison, Patti Smith, and Stephen Sondheim, as well as one of Avedon’s last self-portraits. Texts by a star-studded cohort of authors, including Vince Aletti, Adam Gopnik, Paul Roth, and Gaëlle Morel, shed new light on an under-represented element of Avedon’s practice.

Thoughtfully edited and beautifully produced, Immortal testifies emphatically to the determination with which people confront the relentless advance of mortality.

Queer Havens

July 12 - August 10, 2025

A new exhibition by World Press Photo in collaboration with Pride Photo will open this summer in Amsterdam.

More information about the exhibition

Selected Books